On 25th July 2014, TAPMI students had the privilege of attending the guest lecture by Dr. K Ganesh and Manish K Agarwal from McKinsey & Company. The guest lecture was organised as part of the ongoing Expert Talk series and the topic was Next generation supply chain. Dr. K Ganesh is Knowledge expert at McKinsey & Company and has 10 years of research and consulting experience in supply chain domain. He also has published and presented many papers in leading international Research journals and conferences. Mr. Manish Kumar Agarwal is Research Manager at McKinsey & Company.

The session began with Dr. Ganesh giving an idea about the accelerating pace of technological advancement and shortening timeline of market adoption of new communication and energy technologies. He said that Knowledge repository was very important for any organization and companies now a days have specific team to collect and create information or knowledge. He was of the opinion that today, data is widely available but the ability to extract wisdom from them is scarce. He also stressed on the role analytics and data mining can play in increasing the efficiency in the supply chain. Dr. Ganesh considers Finance and HR to be very important functions and believes need of the hour was to understand the tax complexities and finding right people with right skills. He explained the three key elements in supply chain namely; cost, service and capital and various concerns in supply chain was also looked into.
With business cycles becoming shorter and tougher and rapid urbanisation acting as the driver of growth, Dr. Ganesh opined that new urban centres would evolve and companies needs to be smart in prediction to be successful in business. The session ended with Dr. Ganesh and Mr. Manish stressing on the importance of skills like initiative, risk-taking and good communication to be successful supply chain managers.

The session was very interactive and the students of TAPMI got an opportunity to clear their doubts from the industry experts. The enthusiasm of the students in the classroom was palpable.